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I am religious and believe in free will

70 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

113 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (24%)

Total Members Voted: 249

[None]

i think god's got a pretty strong track record of doing genocides (the flood, plagues, pyroclasms, etc)

is god immoral for doing genocides, or is he moral for genociding immoral people

so is genocide moral if it's against immoral people

or is immorality not 'evil' if perhaps god can be immoral but not evil

[Strongpoint]

Literature character, the God of the Bible, is a vile, evil, and definitely immoral being by anything resembling modern moral values. Not that there is one consistent character of God in the collection of fantasy stories called Tanah or Old Testament.

[lemon10]

To better understand the question - by objective morality do you mean morals that exist independently of human sentiment, morals that are merely constant over time, or both?

If I had to define it I would say that they are morals that are objectively true and exist independently of human cognition.

[McTraveller]

Consider if you made a robot that had sensors that if you started dismantling the robot, or damaged the robot, it made the robot try to run away and/or make a loud noise.

Would it be immoral for you (as the creator) to destroy that robot?

What if the robots were self-replicating and could self-modify their code. Under what circumstances would it be moral for a robot to destroy another robot, if any? Under what circumstances would it be immoral for you, the creator, to destroy some of the robots? Under what circumstances, if any, would it be immoral to not destroy some of the robots?

[None]

i think, if we can not sensibly hold objective morality and it runs in rivulets of what-ifs between our fingers, then perhaps there is no objective morality

[Strongpoint]

Consider if you made a robot that had sensors that if you started dismantling the robot, or damaged the robot, it made the robot try to run away and/or make a loud noise.

Would it be immoral for you (as the creator) to destroy that robot?

What if the robots were self-replicating and could self-modify their code. Under what circumstances would it be moral for a robot to destroy another robot, if any? Under what circumstances would it be immoral for you, the creator, to destroy some of the robots? Under what circumstances, if any, would it be immoral to not destroy some of the robots?

Robots? I thought we are children of God, not unfeeling robots incapable of suffering.

So let's change it. Let's assume I created a world with feeling, sentient, beings over which I have full power... 

Yes, I would totally destroy some if I, for example, would have seen that some guys with funny mustaches would kill those beings by MILLIONS in concentration camps or artificial famines*. I would destroy guys who do this with such fury and clear demonstration of my Divine Power to let every future genocidal maniac know what will happen should they try again. And yeah, I would consider this kind of action to be moral. (and as a being of Divine Power, I would limit collateral damage and not go Global Flood level of imprecision)


*to be fair, if it came to that, it would mean that I already neglected the well-being of those beings.

PS.
I would also not tolerate crimes done in my name, those people would also have gruesome deaths with a clear indication that it was done by that all-powerful guy over there, who they claimed to serve.

[McTraveller]

That's why I stipulated created "feeling" robots, for all observable definitions of "feeling." And self-reprogramming, so that there's the potential for self-agency.

I mean I guess is this is the big thing going on now about "should AI have rights" - because at some point someone is going to pull the plug on a non-biological machine running something that is deemed to have "feelings."

Where lies the line between "machine that we can damage or destroy with no moral implication" and "machine that has moral implications if we damage it"?  What's the difference between biological machines and other machines, for that matter?

[Strongpoint]

Where lies the line between "machine that we can damage or destroy with no moral implication" and "machine that has moral implications if we damage it"?  What's the difference between biological machines and other machines, for that matter?

I have no idea where this line is.  Also, we don't need hypotheticals. We have non-human animals and we are very far from drawing a clear boundary there. And there is also a line between a fetus and a human, which is also not clear at all.

[McTraveller]

Well, my position is (as is stated above) that there is no line.  Not everyone agrees...

[MaxTheFox]

1) It's complicated? I think it's partially subjective and partially objective. I don't think someone is immoral for having somewhat different values from me. I don't think Strongpoint and McTraveller are evil in any meaningful way, even though I disagree with both of them. But if someone's values are so different as to e.g make them a fascist, or a murderer, their subjective morality is evil.
2) This is a hard question to answer. My particular morality, and some others I think are within tolerances, do at least partially come from God. But an atheist can be moral, and a Christian can be immoral. It's up to the individual to make themself not suck.
3) Nah.

1) In other words you do believe in objective morality which is the part of overall morality, right?
2) It doesn't answer the question. Is that objective part of morality created by god? mandated by God? Is it part of the universe that somehow exists independently of God?
3) So... Does it mean that God's requests and desires may be objectively immoral?

1) Yes, I suppose a significant element of it is objective.
2) I don't know.
3) Maybe, I don't know.

[Strongpoint]

Well, my position is (as is stated above) that there is no line.  Not everyone agrees...

If there is no line then the life of a human and the life of a bacterium have the same value.

[McTraveller]

Not value - same moral implication.  I don’t get the impression you think morality of an action depends on the value of the object of the action though… I’m just highlighting the sublety.

[Strongpoint]

Not value - same moral implication.  I don’t get the impression you think morality of an action depends on the value of the object of the action though… I’m just highlighting the sublety.

You got me confused here. The morality of an action absolutely depends on the value of the object of the action. Morality is not a boolean - evil or good. Morality is a value that can be small or huge in either direction.

Morality is about the impact of an action, something that can (in theory, not really in practice) be measured.

Humans created a special enforced system of morality called the justice system which is made to measure the degree of immorality and punish accordingly.

China goes further with the system of Social Credit that punishes or rewards for a far wider number of actions than laws do.

[MaxTheFox]

Yeah I agree with Strongpoint for once.

[McTraveller]

Ah ok, that's an important piece of information for the conversation, which now hopefully affords the opportunity to better describe my belief system:

I don't believe there are "scales" of morality, even though that's not a mainstream view. There's no "this is a little bad" versus "this is a LOT bad" kind of "weighing the balance of good and evil in the scales, to see if you end up in the Good Place™ or the Bad Place™". I don't believe that; I believe that it's a simple boolean: if the "immorality is nonzero, it's immoral."

What does scale is the practical impact of actions.  The earlier examples in this thread demonstrate that: thinking about murdering someone, to me, is just as immoral as actually murdering them. The consequences are very different: in one case, the person is still walking around and in the other they are dead. Same for fantasizing about various acts... big practical difference in just thinking about it versus acting on it.  Killing one person versus "wipe them all out"/Palpatine has a vastly different impact in society.

So if we are arguing about the practical ramifications of behavior, I keep that as separate from the morality.  Because you can be an immoral evil person and have really pleasant practical impact on the world, or you can "only ever have good thoughts" but have zero or even negative impact on the world, for example simply by eating, you are depriving some other organism of its life.

I think the justice system is often abused and blurs the lines between addressing actual impact (like you really did kill someone) versus moral assessment, and I agree that jailing people for "thought crimes" is not what the justice system should be doing.